You are browsing the archive for January 2013 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.

Despite those ski resort images of a deep blue sky and wonderful white powder, the air just down the mountain from such ski resorts as Snowbird and Alta has been a rather toxic soup recently. Salt Lake City has endured yet another winter episode of smog that makes the view look more like Beijing than what you would normally picture for Utah. A group of physicians in the city spoke …

Around midday Friday I looked at the Doppler Radar images from Dover in Delaware, and from Wakefield Virginia and saw the images below. They are a classic case of impending snow, and something you might find interesting (and want to remember)! Here is the Dover,DE NEXRAD radar at the same time (KDOX). ..and so does the NEXRAD at Sterling in Virginia! So here is what we are really looking at: …

SNOWFALL FROM NWS The coldest air in two years has moved into the Northeast and Midwest and with the Great Lakes still not frozen, the heavy snows are really falling in the snow belts. Here in Maryland today we did not reach freezing all day, and will not again tomorrow either.

After the news a couple of weeks ago that the USA had its hottest year on record, NASA and NOAA released the global temperature data today. NOAA pegs it as the 10th warmest and NASA has it as 9th. They both do separate and slightly differing analyses. The bigger story here is that all 9 of the hottest years on record have occurred since 1998. (See below) In case someone tells you …

Temps in Beijing are running around -5C and visibility is less than 200 meters in places. There is a large high pressure system over the region that is causing a strong temperature inversion. This means the air aloft is warmer than the air at the surface so smoke and soot from factories and trucks gets trapped over the city. A blob of warm smoke from a factory smoke stack will begin to rise because it is …

Dr. Richard Alley is one of those few scientists who really connect with the public. He was asked to do the Bjerknes lecture at the AGU meeting in San Francisco last month and it’s an hour of good plain-spoken climate science from a real expert in paleoclimate. I did enjoy the loony letter he shared at the beginning of the lecture. Anyone who works in the science field gets these (I have …

The World’s oceans will rise up considerably higher than usual this week due to an effect called “King TIdes”. The tides are a result of the gravitational forces of the Sun and the Moon of course but when the Moon is full or new we are “lined up” and the gravity from both act in concert with each other. It may seem that a full moon would act opposite but …

This true colour image from the NASA Terra satellite today shows an 800 km long shadow stretching from NE Ohio into the Atlantic. The shadow was the result of the low early January sun angle, and a deck of cirrus clouds at around 10km above the surface. Plenty of other things to notice as well. What a meteorologist sees in this image: 1. Strong winds over the mountains of New …

About Dan

Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.MORE ABOUT DAN >>

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